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Destination Mobility general manager Richard Rosebush, right, and service manager Brian Duymich, left, with public relations representative Kristine Rhoades in front of the new MV1, a vehicle specially equipped for disabled drivers.

Vrrooom to Grow —Richard Rosebush is like no other car dealer I’ve ever met. Maybe that’s because the vehicles he sells serve a humanitarian purpose: they’re specially equipped vans and buses for physically disabled drivers.

Rosebush, 61, has been in the automotive industry for a quarter century. For the past year he’s been the general manager of Destinations Mobility, an arm of Paratransit Inc., the nonprofit that’s been shuttling the disabled and elderly around the Sacramento region since 1978. (For more information, check out the website destinationsmobility.com.)

“I realize that when you talk about nonprofits and car dealers, it’s usually not in the same sentence,” he tells me with a slight smile the other day as we sit in his office on Florin Road, right next door to Paratransit’s headquarters. Since starting his new job, he’s already sold about 45 specially equipped vehicles, to agencies such as Regional Transit, and individuals who can keep driving if their vehicles are modified to accommodate their particular physical challenge. “Everything we sell is wheelchair accessible,” Rosebush says.

Because Destinations Mobility is, like its parent company, a nonprofit, its revenues are poured back into Paratransit so that it can continue to fulfill its mission. “The goal is to have enough money coming in so that Paratransit can offer free services to more disabled people who can’t afford them,” he says. He’d also like to take the Destinations/Paratransit business model to southern California and, eventually, “across the country.” I ask if he means as a franchise. “Well, kind of. We’d be consultants,” he says.

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